imac optical/CD drive issues

hello...i posted before about the issues i was having with my imac (purchased in 2009). my CD drive will only recognize certain cds i put in and i think it only reads audio CDs and not dvds...when i put in a dvd it spins and makes noises and then ejects it. when i go into my preferences (CD and DVDs) the choice of what to do when i insert a DVD says ignore. when i put it to open DVD player it instantly goes back to ignore. this started to happen after i had downloaded a safari update about a year ago. the previous response was to make sure the drive was not damaged and blow it out with air and this seems to have not fixed the problem. it seems to be software related...i can put a DVD in and when it is spit out i put it back in several times and then sometimes it works...any help on this is appreciated. also-when i run a repair disk permissions there are several front row files that continue to come up as having been altered...thanks!

Reading a CD is a easer task for a optical drive than reading a DVD .
So it might indicate that you're optical drive is nearly failing .
To my knowledge repairing disk permission only works if you startup from you're install DVD .
If you do it from a working system it says that it repair the disk permission but it did not not .
Clean you're log and restart the disk repair and you will find the same repairing items .
Do you a USB DVD drive around ?
If so try to read the DVD from the USB drive .
If it is succes full boot you're MAC using the DVD drive and repair you're disk permission from there .
Press the option key during boot to boot from the USB DRIVE

I have same problems after a web upgrade from snow leopard to lion, my optical drive would not read data discs only musik cd and video dvd.
I changed the drive to a new one that helped.
Can you write to a disc?

Got my first iMac 14 months ago. 10 days later it started to eject disks as soon as they were loaded. Even the OS install disks. It went back to Apple and was exchanged for another unit.
For the past 2 months this iMac has been ejecting more and more disks. On the phone Apple Service tried a few things and decided it was a bad drive.
The Genius bar decided it was a bad drive and a bad logic board.

In every case I cleaned the drive right up to the point that the drive wouldn't accept the cleaning disk.

It is typical of slot loading optical drives regardless of the brand and Apple do not make them ~ just install LG etc brands supplied under contract. For what it is worth with new iMasc purchased a cheap Samsung external optical drive to overcome furutre failings of the internal.

This problem will not arise in the new iMac as they have been done away with.

Hang on to those original install discs like grim death! Using OS X.7 or later make a bootable USB thumb drive before running Installer!

Any Apple with a built in cd/dvd drive won't mount an external drive, at least an apple drive. This according to the service tech at a genius bar. I don't know how to use a SuperDrive with an Imac.

That's false. You can mount any kind of external drive you wish with your iMac, USB, firewire, etc. There is also a Blue Ray burner drive kit that you can buy from Other World Computing that will work with your iMac.

I think you misunderstood the tech at the genius bar. They all know that external optical drives work with the iMac.

Superdrive? What kind of "superdrive" are you talking about? As I stated above, external optical drives work just fine with an iMac. I use one, many of us likewise use one. If yours doesn't work, then it's a problem with your iMac not the drive.